Many steps undertaken by Hawai’i Pacific University to stem the beginnings of an enrollment decline resulted in undergraduate applications at a rate of 64 percent over the previous year, a six-fold increase in attendance at Admitted Student Receptions, which went virtual with revamped, more relevant content, a record number of deposits during the first week of campus housing sign-ups for incoming freshmen, and a final first-year enrollment increase of 13 percent over last year, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
In early spring 2019 it became evident that Hawai‘i Pacific University’s fall ’19 class of first-time students would be level, at best, over the previous year. In response, the university set out on a collaborative effort to create growth in undergraduate enrollment for fall ’20 (despite nationwide downward trends) and to create the breathing room to simultaneously develop a more diversified set of revenue streams to bring about growth and, crucially, compliance with the university’s bond covenants.
This entry focuses on the efforts of Communications & Marketing, which partnered with Enrollment Management and Academic Affairs, to develop and implement recruitment-marketing and brand-building strategies, informed by research, that would drive a significant enrollment turnaround. This entry features highlights of:
-- our efforts to enhance Enrollment Management’s already extensive search and yield campaigns
-- our support of some of the new university initiatives to create new revenue streams
